"Grace and Ted Chapman. Literary power couple. Ted is considered "the thinking man's John Grisham" and Grace, his wife of twenty years is beautiful, stylish, carefree. All of this is on the surface. Beneath, what no one sees, is Ted's rages. His mood swings. And the precarious house of cards that their lifestyle is built upon. When Ted's longtime assistant and mainstay leaves, the house of cards begins to crumble and Grace, with dark secrets in her...

The story of the couple's youthful passion and ambition interwoven with a portrait of a marriage, thirty-plus years later, a lifetime's shared compromises, secrets, betrayals, and mutual love.

The sixth (and last) wife of Norman Mailer, Norris Church Mailer, met the late writer in 1975, when she was 26 and he twice her age; they were married for 33 years. Her memoir is, among other things, the story of a series of emancipations: from the constraints of her loving but limiting parents and the claustrophobic moralism of her Arkansas hometown; from her first marriage to a man she quickly outgrew; and from her inhibitions about writing and...

"A shocking murder in an affluent Helsinki suburb has ties to the occult in this thrilling US debut from Finnish author Max Seeck. A bestselling author's wife has been found dead in a gorgeous black evening gown, sitting at the head of a formally set dinner table. Her most chilling feature - her face is frozen in a ghastly smile. At first it seems as though a deranged psychopath is reenacting the gruesome murders from the victim's husband's bestseller,...

"As Leo Tolstoy's wife, Sophia Tolstoy experienced both glory and condemnation during their forty-eight-year marriage. She was admired as the muse and literary assistant to one of the world's most celebrated novelists. But when in later years Tolstoy became a towering public figure and founded a new brand of religion, she was scorned for her disagreements with him. And it is this version of Sophia--malicious, shrill, perennially at war with Tolstoy--that...

"Nora May French and Carrie Sterling arrive at Carmel-by-the-Sea at the turn of the 20th century with dramatically different ambitions. Nora, a stunning, brilliant, impulsive writer in her early twenties, seeks artistic recognition and bohemian refuge among the most celebrated counter-culturalists of the era. Carrie, long-suffering wife of the poet George Sterling, wants the opposite: a semblance of the stability she thought her advantageous marriage...

Three women tell the story of their time with Lafcadio Hearn, a globetrotting writer best known for his books about Meiji-era Japan. Their accounts witness Hearn's remarkable life but also seek to witness their own existence and luminous will to live unbounded by gender, race, and the mores of their time.

"In 1937, twenty-eight-year-old Martha Gellhorn travels alone to Madrid to report on the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War and becomes drawn to the stories of ordinary people caught in the devastating conflict. It's the adventure she's been looking for and her chance to prove herself a worthy journalist in a field dominated by men. But she also finds herself unexpectedly--and uncontrollably--falling in love with Hemingway, a man on his way to becoming...